Soccer Dad

What are we fighting for?

In Who's to blame for the killing (and here) Charles Krauthammer assigns blame for the ongoing violence in Iraq and concludes.

We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse.

It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It willfully overlooks the plainest of facts: Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.

This isn't entirely satisfying though, earlier Krauthammer observed:

America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, the overwhelming majority of them killed by Sunni insurgents, Baathist dead-enders and their al-Qaeda allies who carry on the Saddamist pogroms.

Where have we heard this story before? In the Balkans! After the fall of communism the ethnic hatreds that had been kept in check by Tito exploded for the world to see. Much the same thing is happening in Iraq now.

For all of my optimism about a democratic Iraq, I see that I was naive. The rise of the oppressed Shi'ites in retrospect was a much more realistic outcome. Was there any way to prevent the bloody conflict? Perhaps not, but the failure to anticipate it is probably at the heart of the aministration's political problems as Krauthammer observes.

Our entire strategy has been to fight one side and then the other to try to prevent sectarian violence -- a policy that has been one of the leading reasons why Americans are ready to quit and walk away. They can understand one-front wars, but they can't understand two-, three- and four-front wars, with Americans fighting any and all in sequence and sometimes in combination.

Clearly communicating the likely post-invasion difficulties would have saved the administraiton a lot of grief. Now it's time to make up for that blunder.

Blogdigger tags: Iraq, Charles Krauthammer.

Posted by SoccerDad at February 2, 2007 3:09 AM